Aesthetics and psychoanalysis: for a criticism of modernity

Abstract

The present article intends to cover some foundations of the study of aesthetics, developed at the core of modernity as an academic discipline and as theoretical basis of art criticism. Prepared by romanticism, was subsequently adopted by psychoanalysis. In Freud and in the philosophy of Nietzsche we can observe - as we will try to demonstrate - its privileged function in support of a cultural criticism. This is because, while privileged locus of expression of the tension between pathos and logos, it is in aesthetics that the psychoanalysis finds the main certification of the paradoxes of a culture allegedly seated in self-awareness.